The Gate Thief (Mither Mages)

by Orson Scott Card

  “Touch me again and you’re out of here,” Danny said.

  Mama gave something like a sob and stepped away, holding the hand that had held him in her other hand, as if she had been devastatingly wounded, as if the hand were pumping out blood and the injury could not be healed.

  “We were proud of you,” said Baba, not even glancing at his wife’s reaction. “You were so clever. You understood your danger—not gatemage danger, but drekka danger. You kept your head down. You kept trying to find ways to survive. We saw it and admired you and respected you. I don’t know if I would have had the self-control to handle myself as you did. The trickster boy you were as a child disappeared completely, swallowed up in the careful, careful young man who finally found his power and used it to run away and save his life.”

  “How nice of you to admire me from such a distance,” said Danny. But his father’s words of praise filled him with light and brought tears to his eyes.

  We human beings are such machines, thought Danny. All the emotions are available at the flip of a switch. Predictable as robots.

  “Danny,” said Mama. “I get it that you hate us. I do understand it.”

  But Danny didn’t hate them. He was angry with them, had been hurt by them, but no, he didn’t hate them. After everything, all he really wanted was his mother’s affection and his father’s approval. Now they were offering exactly what he wanted. Only these things had been so long withheld that Danny refused to trust the fulfillment of his longing.

  “Whatever you want from me,” said Danny, “I don’t have it. Or if I do, it’s not for you, not anymore.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” said Mama.

  “I told her not to expect anything better than this,” said Baba.

  For a moment, hearing such finality in Baba’s voice, Danny believed that this whole meeting had been a trap. That, having failed to win him over, they would now unleash whatever assassination they had planned for him.

  So he gated fifteen feet away.

  Mother burst into tears.

  “We aren’t going to betray you,” said Baba coldly. “How could we, even if we wanted to?”

  “Let’s go, Alf,” said Mama.

  “Yes,” said Baba. He led her away toward the family pickup—which looked even more beaten-up now, having spent a short time buried in a crevice in the earth.

  Watching them walk toward the truck, Danny saw them for the first time, not as the crafty leaders of a group of ruthless mages, but as a middle-aged man and woman, weary of everything, having been repudiated by the ungrateful son who blamed them for having done only what was possible for him, and nothing more.

  Danny passed a gate over them. He did it smoothly, carefully. They did not miss a stride. If they felt anything, he would have been surprised. But their steps looked younger, not so tired as they continued to the truck and got inside. He did not wish to punish them. He had thought he did, but now he felt no such desire. He just wanted to stop wanting them to love him. Because now they were saying that they did, and he was hungry to believe them; but they had so many motives to lie that he could not trust a word they said or a thing they did.

  12

  MITTLEGARD

  Wad and Anonoei were back and forth about what to do with the boys. Eluik and Enopp were young and powerless, but they were the most valuable prize. Without these two sons of King Prayard, potential heirs, Anonoei herself had no leverage in the kingdom. Her personal powers were unsuspected, a necessity for a manmage who wished to stay alive. Only the boys mattered.

  Anonoei wanted them kept safe at all costs. So, for that matter, did Wad. But what constituted their safety was where they disagreed.

  “You say it’s not even your own gate, not under your control,” said Anonoei.

  “It’s not under anyone’s control at the moment,” said Wad, “but it exists. It works. There is no danger from the gate. Do you think I’d deceive you about such a thing, when I mean to make the passage with you?”

  “When they’re needed, we’ll need them here,” said Anonoei. “Who is King Prayard in Mittlegard? What protection will being his sons offer them there?”

  “More to the point,” said Wad, “their father’s nothingness in Mittlegard will be their protection. No one in Mittlegard has any reason to want them dead, or any motive to capture them. They’ll have the safety of being nobody. While here, everything depends on your being able to trust whomever you leave them with. Who is that person?”

  Anonoei named several, but Wad had spent too long as the castle monkey, seeing what everyone did in their private moments. He told sadly true tales about every man and woman that she mentioned. She was soon near tears. “I never had friends,” she said.

  “No one has friends,” said Wad. “I was as true a friend to Bexoi as anyone has ever had. But I kept you alive when she wanted you dead.”

  “For reasons of your own,” said Anonoei.

  “I made no claim of generosity,” said Wad. “I make none now. But I want your sons alive, and I will trust strangers on Mittlegard more than anyone known to you in Iceway or anywhere on Westil.”

  “Then I’ll stay here myself, watch over them, and wait for you,” said Anonoei.

  Wad rehearsed the facts to her yet again. How their magical arrival in this high mountain village could not have gone unnoticed. The story would spread, had already spread, would soon float down the Graybourn until it came to the capital city, Kamesham, and then to the castle, Nassassa. There would be no lack of wits in either place, and soon they would put together the woman and two boys who appeared in the high mountains at just the time when a woman and two boys vanished from caves in the cliff face below the castle while soldiers of Prayard attempted to kill them.

  “I’m not leaving you here to die,” said Wad. “I’ll need to move these people who took you in as well, or they’ll surely be tortured to find out information that they do not have.”

  “By ‘here’ I didn’t mean I would stay in this very village. I meant here on Westil, here where we don’t have to pass through any gates.”

  “Stop wasting my time with fears as ridiculous as this. If you were really afraid, you’d try to use your manmagic on me, to get me to comply with your will. But you don’t, so clearly you don’t mean it.”

  “Would my manmagic work on you?”

  “Until I realized what was happening and gated away, of course it would. I appreciate your showing me the respect of not trying. Likewise, if I wanted to I could gate you and your boys against your will to the mouth of the Great Gate and push you through, and you couldn’t do a thing about it. Instead, I’m talking to you, because I’ve treated you as pawns and captives long enough.”

  “I’ve heard what happens to gates,” said Anonoei.

  “What have you heard? How could you hear anything? There hasn’t been a gate on Westil, except of my making, for more than fourteen centuries.”

  “There have been gates,” said Anonoei. “Everyone knows the stories. A gatemage learns to go from here to there, and then suddenly the Gate Thief comes and takes them all away. What if that happens while we’re—”

  “Haven’t you understood anything, woman?” demanded Wad. “I’m the Gate Thief. Me. That’s why I could keep you locked up behind my gates for more than a year, and no one took the gates from me.”

  “If you’re the Gate Thief—and yes, I understood you, but why should I pay attention to such ridiculous brag?—then you must have been alive for more than a thousand years. You, a mere boy—”

  “Why would anyone bother to become immortal in an old body?” asked Wad. “But I’m not immortal. I was in a tree. More precisely, a treemage persuaded a tree to let me gate into the living treeflesh between the bark and the dry wood. There I made the tiniest of gates, which moved me slowly upward through the tree, rising with me, rising far more slowly than a fingernail grows. Passing through a gate heals you. I healed myself, I healed the tree, minute by minute, day by day, year by year. The tr
ee lived and I lived, never aging, never ill. And I watched. Every gate that was made, I sensed. At first my powers were magnificently strong, as yours will be if you ever make up your mind to go through a Great Gate. But that boost in power fades with time. I had to watch ever more closely, concentrate ever more tightly. My outselves roamed the world, alert, watching. After the first five hundred years, I sensed nothing from Mittlegard; after the second thousand, gates on Westil were like a distant whisper, except for the making of a Great Gate. That was like a shout, as the gates entwined and roped and rose into the sky. Then I reached out and swallowed them. That’s your Gate Thief. The husk of an ancient man, kept alive within a tree, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, only an endless watchfulness for the making of a Great Gate, with only the captured gates of long-dead mages to keep me company.”

  “So you’re not as young as you seem,” said Anonoei. And then she smiled, so he would know that she understood the bathos of her own remark.

  “I came out like an adolescent orphan, hardly remembering anything of my life before, not even understanding that I was the Gate Thief, and for a time not knowing what a gate was. I ate gates by reflex then. I made them the same way. A kind woman took me in and I made a mother of her, until someone murdered her for refusing to cooperate with an attempt to poison the queen.”

  “You’re talking about Hull?” asked Anonoei.

  “Please don’t tell me that you knew beforehand about the killing of that good woman,” said Wad. “Unless it’s true. If you lie to me we can’t be friends.”

  “So many rules you have,” said Anonoei. “I lie to you all the time, and you lie to me. We’re human and we lie, because that is the only way people can possibly get along with each other.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Wad. “We can tell each other the truth, as far as we know it. We might be wrong about what we believe is true, but we can speak our best understanding to each other. Hull did that with me, and I with her.”

  “She knew you were the Gate Thief?” asked Anonoei. And when Wad didn’t answer, she smiled. “I see—you told her the truth, except when the truth might make her like you less.”

  “So what is it that you aren’t telling me?”

  “That I think you’re right, the boys will be safer on Mittlegard, and if I can’t take the risk of trusting you to get me through a Great Gate and back again, I might as well give up. If you’re not trustworthy then I’ve got nothing, but if I refuse to trust you then I’ve got nothing. So I might as well trust you and hope that you amount to something.”

  “A fair gamble.”

  “I trusted a king once,” said Anonoei.

  “He never let you down.”

  “But he did,” said Anonoei. “He may not have meant to, but he failed to find me and set me free.”

  “My powers were too much for him,” said Wad. “What could he do against a gatemage?”

  “Queen Bexoi did something,” said Anonoei.

  “She murdered a baby when I was distracted. That was the limit of her power.” He said it calmly, as if the mention of Trick had not caused emotion to rage upward from his belly to fill his heart with grief and his mind with rage. “And she knew what I was. If Prayard had known, he would have suspected me, and if he had suspected me in your disappearance, he would have had me tortured to find out where you were.”

  “You? Tortured?”

  “He would have tried.”

  “Did he even ask you?”

  “I told him that I had looked at every inch of the castle and you weren’t there. Nor had I seen anyone carrying you out. All true, you’ll note.”

  “And also lies,” said Anonoei. “I’m such a fool to believe in you.”

  “I’m all you’ve got, and you’re all I’ve got.”

  “All you’ve got to use against Queen Bexoi?” said Anonoei. “Why not just pass her through a gate to the bottom of the sea?”

  “She has to lose and know that she has lost,” said Wad. “She has to see you in her place, and your sons in the place of her son.”

  Anonoei laughed and nodded. “Now I can trust you. Now I know your heart.”

  But she did not know him, not his heart, not his mind. Yes, he meant to wreak his vengeance on the queen, and so he spoke that way because Anonoei would understand that motive and believe him. But his real reason was that until he had put Anonoei back in her right place, beside the king, with her sons as his heirs, the guilt of his own crimes would be unbearably heavy, more than he could bear.

  I spent fifteen centuries trying to save the world, and I would sacrifice it all for mere vengeance? Bexoi would never be brought to justice. She played the same game as all the royal people of the world; should she be called a monster because she was better at it?

  No, Wad’s chief purpose was still and always would be to keep Bel from walking upon the face of Westil, taking its reins into his hand. If he could redeem himself for his crimes against Anonoei and her children, without discommoding that main purpose, that would be well and good. But for vengeance and retribution he would not cross the street.

  Hearing such a thought in his own mind, he laughed bitterly. Self-deception always works—it has such a willing audience.

  “What are you laughing at?” asked Anonoei.

  “Myself,” he said truthfully.

  When they explained the purpose of their upcoming journey to the boys, the younger one, Enopp, seemed to understand. Eluik, as usual, looked at the face from which the talking-noises came, but there was no sign that the language registered in his mind at all.

  Then he talked to Roop and Levet.

  “I did you no kindness bringing this woman and her children here,” said Wad. “I realize that now. The soldiers will be here soon, and if they don’t kill you outright, they’ll have you brought to the castle of Nassassa and torture you to tell them things you do not even know.”

  Levet understood and her face flashed with anger, though she said nothing. Roop showed no anger. He merely bowed his head in resignation. “What must I do?” he asked.

  “There is a windmage from Mittlegard named Ced. He’s being trained by a treemage at the southern end of Mitherkame. The treemage refuses to have a name, since trees have no language. I asked the treemage if he would object to having the meadows near him cultivated, and he did not mind at all. Fell no trees and he will be your friend. Until you have a harvest, he will teach you how to let the trees provide for you.”

  “So we leave everything,” said Levet.

  “Again,” said Roop.

  “You’ve moved before. This time it will be a warmer place, with richer soil and a growing season long enough that it isn’t over before the seeds have pushed up stems and sunk roots fully into the earth.”

  “What service will we owe the man?” asked Levet.

  “None,” said Wad. “Not even the hand of your lovely daughter as his bride.”

  They looked alarmed.

  “I say he won’t require it,” Wad reassured them.

  “Are there people in the world who would demand such things?” asked Roop.

  “Kings require it of each other all the time. It’s how Queen Bexoi came to Iceway. She was forced on Prayard against his will.”

  Roop reached out his hand to hold Eko. “You say we must do this.”

  “Or leave your children orphans. Or watch them tortured before your eyes, if they believe you really know where I and this woman and her two sons have gone.”

  “You’re a terrible friend to have,” said Eko.

  “I am,” agreed Wad. “But then, I could have left you to your fate, not caring.”

  “You’d never do that,” said Eko. “That is not the man you are.”

  You don’t know the man I am, thought Wad.

  As if she heard him, or guessed from his face, Eko said, “I know you better than you think.”

  “Because you saw him crawling from a tree?” her little brother Bokky teased.

  “Because he did bring them here,�
�� said Eko. “He remembered us.”

  “I wish he hadn’t,” said Levet.

  “He remembered we were kind to him,” said Eko, “and so when he needed kindness for someone else, he came to us.”

  “Yes,” said Wad.

  Eko faced him boldly. “If you said that I would need to marry someone to save my family,” said Eko, “I would do it.”

  “But I won’t say that to you,” said Wad.

  “You’ll keep us safe,” said Eko. “From everyone?”

  “I’ll take you to a place that I believe will be as safe as anywhere on Westil. More than that I can’t promise. I won’t be there to watch. It’s the best I can do.”

  In the end, had they a choice? They gathered their few possessions, and Wad made a public gate for them, and they stepped through it, one by one.

  Anonoei watched them do it, she and her sons.

  Wad turned to her, when the last of Roop’s and Levet’s family had gone. “Now you know what it looks like,” he said.

  “Going through a gate?” Anonoei asked. “I have fallen through the gate of my prison a hundred times.”

  “What trust looks like,” said Wad.

  “They’re not mages,” said Anonoei. “What choices do they have?”

  “I don’t know what powers those children might have, and for all I know the father has some power with vegetables, or the mother a way with snakes. They have choices, as many as you have.”

  Anonoei laughed. “I have as few as they, you’re right,” she said. “Perhaps they seemed weak to me because they love each other.”

  It was such a shocking thing to say that Wad had no answer for her.

  “I lived too long at court,” said Anonoei. “I have seen people owned, desired, and coveted, and I have seen people used, but few were loved, and few were loving.”

  “You love your sons,” said Wad.

  “I barely know my poor broken children,” said Anonoei, resting one hand on Enopp’s head, the other on Eluik’s shoulder. “Aren’t you going to follow those farm folk, and introduce them and the treemage to each other?”